As is well known, the bandit is an established stereotype in nineteenth-century Spanish popular culture, ranging across broadsheets (pliegos de cordel), aleluyas and the serialized novel (folletín). This chapter will focus on a later moment, from 1926 to 1932, when the bandit was taken up as a cultural motif in Spain not only by the mass-cultural medium of film but also by high culture. In this instance, the self-reflexive treatment of the stereotype leads to its destabilization through the emphasis on the crossing of class boundaries; that is, on ‘passing’ in class terms. The bandit's ability to ‘pass’ is seen strikingly in the first two texts discussed: José Buchs's silent film Una extraña aventura de Luis Candelas (1926) and the avant-garde writer Antonio Espina's novelized biography Luis Candelas, el bandido de Madrid (1929). The protagonist of both texts – the early nineteenth-century Madrid urban bandit Luis Candelas – was famed for his ability to pass as a bourgeois gentleman. We may note that this contradicts Eric Hobsbawm's much-criticized notion of bandits as ‘primitive rebels’; as we shall see, Espina's biography associates Candelas specifically with modernity. The third text discussed – the folkloric drama by the brothers Antonio and Manuel Machado, La duquesa de Benamejí (1932) – depicts a crossing of class boundaries in the opposite direction, with its Andalusian duchess protagonist who falls for, and throws her lot in with, a bandit, in a case of ‘slumming it’ that involves cross-dressing in gender as well as class terms. In all of these texts there is a self-reflexive emphasis on identity as masquerade, as ‘dressing up’ (or ‘dressing down’). Self-reflexivity and masquerade are features that characterize not only the 1920s avant-garde, with its play on the notion that identity is a ‘costume’ that can be put on and taken off, but also popular culture, with its love of mimicry and mistaken identities. The class passing depicted in these texts is not unrelated to the ability of the bandit figure to move between popular and high culture in this period.

All three works are set under or in the aftermath of the despotic rule of Fernando VII, which enables the bandit to be seen as an emblem of freedom: Luis Candelas's dates are 1806–37; those of José María el Tempranillo, ‘el rey de Sierra Morena’ (the King of Sierra Morena), on whom the Machados’ play is loosely based, are 1805–33.